


ode to the west wind

by disenchanted



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Academia, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, in which charles has too many books and not nearly enough erik, the love song of c. francis xavier, unpleasant xavier family dynamics, unresolved sexual tension until it is eventually resolved
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-27
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-06 03:30:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles Xavier is a lonely, long-suffering professor of literature at a prestigious university in upstate New York. Erik Lehnsherr is a brilliant, severe art historian on loan for a year from a university in Berlin. Inevitably, love ensues—but not without some tribulation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. of noble natures, of the gloomy days

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! I truly did not think that I would be back so soon, but the Academia AU bug has bit me and now I am hopeless.

The summer is nearly over. Hemingway had spoken of the death of the spring, but to Charles, the death of the summer is worse: the trees shed their leaves, and the air grows cold, and the town begins its descent into the incipient chill of an upstate winter. It is good, then, that the sadness of the season is tempered by the beauty of the fall semester. As the season dies, the lives of the students begin; the freshmen crowd the halls, some still spotted with the marks of childishness, all of them wide-grinning and messy-haired and eager, bursting with intent. They will become wonderful minds. Charles is sure of it.

-

There are a few more days left, however, before that thrill and sparkle of the momentous beginning of the rest of their lives. Charles spends Friday working, reviewing his lesson plans and thumbing through the novels he will assign. After dinner, he finds himself drawn to his favorite bar; he drinks more than he ought to drink, and sees a beautiful young man—slight, blonde, shorter still than Charles, with a naïve smile and wide grey eyes—and after discerning that he is not a student, Charles takes him back to his house. It is a mistake.

Charles kisses him in the back of the cab, slides his fingers through his hair and sucks at his neck and presses his fingers over the man's crotch, urges him into hardness before they reach Charles' house. They tug off their clothes in the foyer, fumbling into kisses, yanking at ties and at buttons, and the man presses Charles against the wall, sinks to his knees and takes Charles into his mouth. 

'Ouch,' Charles hisses—and the man pulls back, kisses sloppily at the crown of Charles' cock and presses down, again. His teeth scrape against Charles' shaft. 'Lips, dear,' Charles tries to say, squinting and baring his teeth— 'Wrap your lips—' The man cannot amend his mistakes, and Charles tugs him up again, kissing him numbly and saying, 'Let's—let's go up to the bedroom, why don't we, instead.' 

Charles takes him to what he has privately dubbed his ' _chambre des hommes transitoires_ '. The room he sleeps in is sacred, a holy palace of books and art and music, a paper-scented passage to a time past—but there are five bedrooms, and he sullies the sparsest. The man he has chosen rolls Charles onto his knees, fingers Charles with the discomforting aura of a medical exam.

'It's all right,' Charles says; he looks down at the bedsheets, sees them spin beneath him, wonders if he might not call it all off and go downstairs and make himself a midnight breakfast. 'I'm ready.' 

After rolling a condom over his cock, the man places his hands at Charles' hips, shifts on his knees and moans and presses into him. He is large, too much for comfort, and fucks as if he is lumbering towards something, his hips in uneven thrusts forward, Charles shifting with him, knees skidding against the sheets. Charles thinks of meter and rhyme.

> _the cock, so large, is not well-won—  
>  a fuck in which my pride's undone—  
>  to come is but a sweet affair—  
>  now soft—I take—arse in despair._

He laughs, quietly, and the man goes still. 

They re-dress in the light of a sole lamp. Charles calls the man a cab. On the portico, headlights blinding in the country darkness, August crickets loud around them, Charles kisses him on the cheek and bids him a warm farewell. As the cab pulls away, gravel under its tires, Charles slams the front door behind him and leans back against it and rubs his hands over his face and sighs. He returns to bed and masturbates quietly, brings himself to a dull shiver of an orgasm.

-

At dawn, after two cups of brandy, Charles spins slowly in his chair in the study, iPhone at his ear. The mahogany of his desk grows brighter, richer in color, as the sun rises behind him. It is warm, even at dawn, and Charles rolls his shirt-sleeves up as he listens to the ring. His vision swims with drunkenness; when the man on the other line picks up, Charles feels that the room sways around him.

'—Had better be important,' the man on the phone tells him. The voice sounds like gravel, like metal at a grindstone; it is unlike the bright chirp of the man that Charles had bedded that night.

'I was thinking of you,' Charles says. He is quiet, and his voice is small. He leans back into the leather of his chair, inhales its scent, rests his elbows on the arms and sighs into the phone. 'I'm sorry for calling so early. I do apologize. But I wanted to hear your voice.'

'Charles—' When the man huffs, the connection crackles. In silence, Charles hears the sound of geese, the sound of small songbirds, the low, chilly cry of an owl. 'Whatever you're going through—' He stops, again, and Charles feels a hardness settling into him—a coldness, too, as if he is lowered head-first into Arctic water. 'If you want to talk to someone, find a therapist. _You and I_ have finished. Don't call me again.'

'I won't, then,' Charles says. 'I do wish you—' The line is dead. 'Wish you well,' he continues. 'I wish you well. Good-bye.' 

To the song of the morning birds, to the red of the morning sun, he deletes the number from his address book. He sets his phone on the table in front of him, over top of a stack of books, and watches the reflection of the window in the darkened screen. 

He feels as if his house—for it is his house, not his home—has been stretched away from the rest of the world, set into the tundra, prised away from the last reaching tendrils of touch. He feels as if he could climb into his car and drive, and drive, and drive, and it would be always forest, always solitude, the wilderness unrolling in front of him in an impenetrable infinity.

In the brightening light, he walks up to his bedroom and drinks a glass of water and takes a paracetamol and eases himself into bed, still dressed, curling on his side, away from the sun.

-

On the first day of classes, it rains. It is the last week of August, and the world is stuck still in a humid lingering that seems to spread the summer onwards, a heavy, sticky slide of late nights and late mornings. The air is warm, but the sky sparks with lightning, and Charles wakes to the sound of thunder muted through the walls. He shifts in bed, rolls onto his side, still dizzy with sleep; through blurry eyes, he peers at the clock on his bedside table. It is 8:53. 

'Oh!' The sleep-haze disappears. 'My God,' he breathes, 'Oh. God. Oh, God. What have I done.'

The summer has snapped away. There is no more sweetness, no more of that drifting honeysuckle of the summer holidays. It is the first day of the fall semester, and he is late. He had meant to wake early, to take a luxurious shower and make an attempt at parting his hair differently, had meant to make himself a fry-up as a blessing for the semester to come—had meant to.

Instead, he strips his pyjamas as he bolts to the bathroom, leaves small piles of pinstripe-blue in a trail over the Persian carpet. He shaves and brushes his teeth in the nude, scrubs his underarms with a washcloth and dabs deodorant there when he is finished, runs his fingers through his unwashed hair and races back into the bedroom. 

With hardwood floor under his bare feet, he throws open his armoire—realizes that he had meant to do laundry, too, and had put it off in favor of reviewing the notes for his lecture. There is little left but a pair of rumpled trousers—dubiously clean—a green button-down, and a red jumper. He will have to risk being called 'Professor Christmas'. He trips, tugging on his trousers, and nearly slips down to the floor. Recovered, he buttons his shirt in haste, pulls the jumper over his head and yanks on a pair of mismatched socks and bounds downstairs, sprinting down two flights of stairs as if he is a child, stopping in the study to shove books and papers into his satchel before careening to the foyer to slip on his worn brogues. 

'Good-bye,' he calls, to the empty house. 'Wish me luck.' His voice echoes from the white of the high ceilings, returns to him in a jarring reverb.

He opens the door, is met with a wall of rain, and doubles back to find an umbrella.

-

Haworth University had been one of the first great institutions of America. Charles often hears freshmen say that they have stepped back in time, that they have been taken away to a place where the country is verdant and the minds more so, where they will take their stand as the last embodiments of the intellectuals of old. Whether or not it merits its reputation, Haworth is undeniably aged. In 1735, as the Xaviers lingered in the docile hills of the south of England, the university was set into the countryside of New York; and there it rests, rising from the trees in brick and granite, an oasis apart from the modern world. 

Charles can, in approaching the campus, recall how he had felt five years past; he eases his car through the sweep of rain and thinks of himself as he had been at twenty-one, loose with the fervor of youth, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, at the head of a lecture hall filled with students no younger than himself. Too much has changed, and too little has changed. He thinks that he has, perhaps, grown old, or weathered into a soft type of maturity; but the only thing he knows with certainty is that he has remained singularly unpunctual.

-

'I was late,' he sighs, in line at the campus coffee shop. 'For my first class of the first day of the year. Arrived huffing and puffing at nine forty-five as if I were some sort of—' He raises his hand to his forehead, shuts his eyes as if to shut out the memory. 'After the dining hall debacle of last year, I meant to at least make an attempt at professionalism.'

'You're a brilliant man,' Dr. MacTaggert tells him. 'They'll forgive you.' 

'Thank you,' he says. He smiles at her, all warmth and brightness, complacent lips and softly-knit brows. Still, his eyes are dull. 'I'm sure you're right.'

'—Dr. Xavier,' she ventures, eyes wandering down to his chest. 'Christmas isn't for another five months.' 

'One of my students had the kindness to point it out, yes, thank you. Very surprised about it. I had celebrated Christmas in August for all five years I've taught here. I had thought it was the American way.'

She rolls her eyes at him and moves up in the line.

-

Even the first sip of his large mocha latte (double espresso) does little to lift his spirits. It is twelve-fifty, and his next class—'Existential Literature Before the Second World War'—is at one o'clock. The building in which he teaches is five minutes away, but it is still raining—great rushes of water, a green sky and wet brick and muddy lawns—and he hurries regardless. 

Under the awning outside of the coffee shop, he fumbles with his umbrella, holding his cup in the crook of his right elbow and jerking his left arm forward, making an attempt to force the umbrella to bloom while keeping his coffee steady. His fingers slip along the wet metal, and his shoes slip along the wet sidewalk, and when the umbrella bursts into fullness, it takes him off-guard, makes his heart skip; he trips backwards and lands against something hard, cup slipping from his arm, top popping open, latte splashing against what he has run into. With a slide of vinyl and a quick tap of metal, the umbrella drops to the ground, rolling slightly before coming to a stop.

'Ah—!' Charles hears himself cry.

He spins, and sees that he faces a black polo neck jumper. The moment lasts a second, perhaps, in the time of the real world—but to Charles it is forever, a painful constant shuddering scrape of shame, a quick-twisting fright in the center of his chest. His gaze slides slowly, slowly, up—first to the neck of the jumper—then to the strong jaw above it—then to the hard, handsome lines of set lips, long nose—to sea-like eyes, to well-groomed tawny hair. His gaze slips back down, again—over the eyes, nose, lips, jaw, the neck of the jumper, the wiry V of a torso—to khaki trousers, a wide mocha-colored stain spread across the thighs and knees. 

Time snaps back into place. 

'Oh,' Charles gasps. 'Oh, no. I've done it again.' He raises his empty hands to his cheeks. 'I am... _utterly_ apologetic— _immensely_ sorry, the sorriest I have _ever_ been—' 

'I doubt that,' the man says, resting his hands in his pockets. 'That you're the sorriest you ever have been.' 

There is silence, and the sound of the rain, and Charles cannot tell whether his eyes are amused or deadly cold. His accent, Charles thinks, is the type of half-American half-English that Europeans use. There is a tinge of something else; Charles cannot place it, and decides that this is no time to think of accents, no time to think of strangers' eyes.

He fumbles in his satchel, speaks quickly, says, 'Yes, well—perhaps not that I've _ever_ been, but it feels as if it is—oh, this is absolutely _furiously_ embarrassing—I suppose I oughtn't say that in regards to myself, I've spilled it on you, haven't I— I think I've got napkins in here, if you'll wait—'

'Don't worry yourself,' he tells Charles. 'I'm not married to my trousers.'

Charles looks up from his satchel, then; when he sees the stranger's eyes, he is caught, rendered speechless. His hands falter and still, go limp at the strap and the buckle.

'Do you come from the university?' the stranger asks; he tilts his head, for a moment, towards the building in which Charles' class is held, all red brick and leafed trees and white columns—and when he sees that Charles nods, he continues. 'You're a student?' 

'Professor,' Charles corrects. 

He watches as the man regards him—sees that as he regards Charles his expression shifts into an endless doubling and re-doubling of mute feeling. There is some emotion, Charles realizes, some thought that passes through the stranger's mind; Charles searches the lines of his face as if they are to be read.

'Professor,' the stranger repeats, 'of course.' He is sharp, his tone berating, as if he reprimands himself for his incorrectness. 

'But I _am_ sorry,' Charles says. 'I'll buy you another pair of trousers—ten pairs, if you'd like.'

'You should go on.' The man shrugs, broad shoulders in a noncommittal stroke of black, and turns away. He walks in the rain without flinching.

Charles kicks the empty cup, crushes it under its heel, and softly belittles himself. 

He is late for his one o'clock class. 

-

On Mondays, Charles' office hours are from two-thirty to four; he takes solace, then, in his cramped little office in the cramped little wing that serves as the English department. The ceiling slopes strangely, and the window is half-covered with a stack of books, and the overhead light shuts off at inopportune moments, and there are cracks in the walls and creaks in the floor, and there is mildew quietly reaching its fingers into the corners of the faded yellow walls—but there are books, too, shelves of them, stacks of them, precarious piles that are liable to tip at a light breeze, poetry books and fiction books and non-fiction books and science books and history books, new books and old books and very old books—and, stuffed away at the back of a double-stacked shelf, Charles' own books. There are inkwells and dip pens, quill pens and fountain pens, ballpoint pens and engraved pens; there is writing paper and graph paper and hotel paper, pulp-thick hand-made paper and spiral notebook paper and 19th century laid paper. Charles' office, he has come to realize, is more of a home than his house is. 

In the electric kettle resting on top of a stack of old literary magazines, he sets water to boil; as it heats, he takes his place behind his desk, leans back in his chair and covers his face with his hands and groans softly to himself.

'Oh, why,' he mumbles. 'Why, why, why.'

-

A student arrives to speak with him—a new sophomore, Charles' favorite type, with paltry knowledge but unbounded enthusiasm. He sits in the chair across from Charles' desk, a cup of Charles' loose-leaf afternoon tea in his hands, and crosses his legs and un-crosses them, shifts in his seat and taps his fingers on the cup. He stares past Charles, at the portrait of Shelley hanging on the wall behind his desk.

'How are you?' Charles asks. He spreads a smile across his face, exudes warmth, fills the room with it. 'How have you found your first day back? Tell me all about it.'

'I don't know,' the boy evades. 'I only had one class this morning. But I came here to— I wanted to switch my major from Art History to English.' 

'May I ask why?' Charles shifts from a smile to a frown—concerned, soft, fatherly. He leans forward, looks into the boy's eyes. 'Art history is a wonderful field, you know. Rather amazing; I always admired it. Of course I would never put anyone off English, but if art history is your passion—'

'It's my professor,' the boy interrupts. 'The one I just took a class with. He knows about art, but...' He takes a sip of his tea and slides his gaze from the portrait to Charles. 'He terrifies me. Speaking frankly. And he terrifies everyone else. Did you know half the students in Art History 300 have already dropped the class?' 

Charles allows a sigh to slip from his lips; he closes his eyes and rests for a moment in darkness, massages his fingers over his forehead. When he opens his eyes, the room seems to have brightened.

'I don't know how kindly I can phrase this. There will always be awful professors, Alex. I wish it wasn't so—I do, truly—but it happens to be one of the indelible failures of academia. You may drop the course, if you'd like—but changing your major...' 

'Art History 300 is required before I can take any more 300-level courses in the major,' he says, 'and no one else is teaching it this year. And I refuse to take it with Professor Lehnsherr.'

-

'What do you know about a Professor Lehnsherr?' Charles asks Dr. MacTaggert, when he wanders down to the kitchenette to fetch a bit of sugar, ostensibly for his tea. 'Teaches Art History 300, apparently? I've not heard the name before.' 

'Oh,' Dr. MacTaggert says, mouth half-full with re-heated take-away— 'Right. The new prof _auf Deutschland._ ' She chews, swallows. When she speaks, she gestures to Charles with her chopsticks. 'He's not really the new prof—well, he's on loan for a year. Apparently from the Berlin University of the Arts.' 

'It's _aus Deutschland,_ ' Charles says.

He hops up on the counter, swings his legs, plucks a sugar cube from the jar and nibbles at it, lets the sweetness tease his tongue. Through the curtained window, he sees a split of lightning. The room is filled with the sound of rain at glass. 

'Why do you ask, anyway? I didn't think you cared much about Art History.' 

'A student came into my office,' Charles explains, words muffled as he nibbles at his sugar cube. 'He took one class of Lehnsherr's and ran to me—' He takes the cube from between his teeth, then, and speaks slowly, imbuing his words with meaning, with heaviness. ' _—Asking to switch his major from Art History to English._ '

Dr. MacTaggert's eyebrows raise; Charles matches her, nodding solemnly. 

Later, as she folds the tops of her take-away, Charles asks her, 'Would you care to go for a drink, tonight? I'll buy—I had thought we might discuss the new translation of _Medea_ —of which I have _two_ pre-release copies.' He beams. 

She knows that it is not a proposition. Still, she shrugs.

'Sorry,' she tells him. 'I've got some other things I have to take care of. I'll get a copy of the translation when it comes out to the public.' 

She smiles apologetically, tosses the empty take-away boxes in the bin, and retreats to her own office.

-

By five o'clock, the sun has farther slid in its downward slope behind the clouds, and Charles has decided that he must speak with the Art History department. As he walks, umbrella over his shoulder, he stirs himself into a froth. The soles of his brogues hit the rain-slick brickwork, and he envisions himself in front of the head of the Art History department, shoulders wide and spine straight, saying, _No student deserves to be driven away from his passion because he has the unfortunate luck to be placed with a rotten professor. I don't care what sort of standing Professor Lehnsherr has in Germany; if he is destroying students' drive to learn, send him back to Berlin. Yes, I know I'm from the English department! But I do care about these students— Rather more than Lehnsherr cares, apparently!_

He imagines the head of the department smiling, sighing, placing his hand on Charles' shoulder, telling him, _I always knew you had the students' best interests in mind. You're incredible, really. No, no, don't deny it. You are. What would this school do without you? We've sent Lehnsherr on the first plane back to Berlin. I don't know what I was thinking when I hired him. I spoke with the dean, by the way; how do you feel about a new humanities building? Xavier Hall?_

When he arrives at the Art History department—in a building perhaps more worn than that which houses the English department, weathered and ivy-clad at the far reaches of campus—he fumbles with his umbrella again, spatters an errant professor with rain-drops as he wrestles it into collapsing.

'May I help you?' the secretary asks him.

'Oh—Hello, yes, I—' He scans the cramped foyer for an umbrella holder, finds none, and props his umbrella against the wall. It slides onto the ground. 'Yes,' he continues, facing the secretary, tugging down the hem of his jumper. 'My name is Charles Xavier—I teach in the English department—but I wonder if I might speak with the head of the department here?'

'He's in with someone else right now,' she says, glancing her watch. 'It's almost the end of business hours. You can wait, or I can give you his e-mail address.'

'I'll—' Charles weighs his options. 'I'll wait, thank you.' 

He takes a seat on a small blue sofa outside of the department head's office. It smells faintly of Lysol and cheap coffee, as if someone had spilt on it and tried to cover it up. Charles sits primly, at first, watching the door—but as time wears on, he slumps, leans his head back against the cushion and crosses his legs and plays with the frays on his jumper. He thinks of Xavier Hall, of tenure, of the praise that will inevitably be directed to his (as of yet) unwritten book on the Romantics.

Slowly—quietly, at first, nearly imperceptibly—he becomes aware of the sound of voices from the room ahead of him. When they begin, they are muted, impossible to understand. They grow louder. There is a muffled sound of slamming. Hands against a desk.

'—Isn't how we do things in America! My _apologies_ , but you shouldn't presume—' 

The voices grow quieter, again, and Charles sits up. He glances about the hall before leaning towards the door, straining himself to listen. The second voice rises.

'—Mobiles, computers, _hand-held games_ —as if the moment I cut the lights for the projector I can't—' 

The voice—deep, slightly accented—sounds familiar to Charles. He supposes that he must have sat near Professor Lehnsherr at the staff table in the dining hall. Charles pictures a portly, white-bearded man in a rumpled suit, face bright red with rage, flapping his arms ineffectually; he scans through faces, thinks of anyone he has seen on campus who matches the image in his head.

'—With your students in Berlin, perhaps, but you must understand—'

Another slam, then, loud enough to make Charles flinch.

'—Because I am certain that _they can do better than this!_ '

Charles feels, then, as if the world has slowed—as if time gives his consciousness a small window in which to be righted. He can perceive, distinctly, the way that his mind rearranges itself, his prejudice and his presumptuousness slipping into sudden understanding—the turning-on of a light, the clap of a hand—the shameful ' _oh_ ' of misinterpretation split through by comprehension. Lehnsherr is not a man who destroys passion: he conducts it. He is one of the rare breed, a type that Charles had only known perhaps thrice at Harvard and at Oxford—a professor who forges his students with heat and with cruelty, who breaks the weak and lets them heal stronger. 

The door opens before Charles can accept the necessity of scurrying away. In front of him—shoulders heaving, temple beaded with sweat—stands a man with well-groomed hair and sea-like eyes and a black polo neck jumper and a mocha-colored stain across the thighs of his trousers. Charles breathes. He can do little else. 

Professor Lehnsherr, Charles thinks, is the old Reichstag; he is palatial, Palladian, shoulders wide, skin worn like limestone; and when he breathes—when his chest rises, when his chest falls, when his breath slips from his nose in ragged anger—he is Unter den Linden as it is winter-barren, wind through bare branches, and he makes Charles want to seek his shade; he makes Charles small among his reaches. 

Lehnsherr's eyes sweep over Charles—seem to sweep past him, or through him, as if he is a part of the décor, as if he is faded and patched—as if he is obscure, unimpressive, and unworthy. He makes haste to depart, then, and when he does, he slams the door behind him. Charles watches the curve of his waist as he goes.

'Advising hours are over,' the head of the department tells Charles, when he emerges from the office. 

Charles leaps to his feet.

'Oh, yes, but I'm not— I'm not a—' He stops, then, sighs, and waves his hands in a limp, dismissive gesture. 'It's all right. Never mind. Have a good evening. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

-

Rain-soaked, hands shaking, Charles lets himself be drawn back into the dryness and comfort of the English department. The lights in the windows, as he approaches, are yellow in the dim of the clouds; they seem to invite him, beckon him in, promise companionship. The wind blows westwards, and rain sweeps through the streets, moistens Charles' skin, dampens his clothing and dampens his hair.

Safely indoors, he sheds his wet jumper, shakes out his damp hair and trudges slowly up the narrow stairs to the third floor. Like a woodland animal, fawn-colored and grass-stained and wide-eyed, he perks at the muffled sound of a woman's voice, and as he navigates the winding hallways, he passes by Dr. MacTaggert's office. There, the voice grows louder, punctuated by long pauses—she is speaking on the telephone.

'—Just asked me out for drinks. I said I had to do something else. … No, he's gay. Yes, I'm a hundred percent certain. I—yes. He means well, but he's... really, incorrigibly boring. … I do feel bad—! He loves his job, and that's wonderful... but he's—physically—literally—incapable of talking about anything else. … Right. ... I kept making the mistake of agreeing to grab lunch with him last year, and he—' She sighs. 'Yes, and I love literature, too, or I wouldn't teach it, but I think he has nothing else in his life. You know what I mean. It's disheartening.' A pause, then, and a laugh. 'Yes, that's who he reminds me of!'

Charles goes onwards. In his office, he locks the door; he places his jumper over the radiator to dry and settles into his chair, again. His gaze wanders to the pre-release copies of _Medea_ , prominently placed atop of the slopes of papers that threaten to swallow his desk. He sweeps the books to the floor with a flutter of paper and props his feet on his desk, leans back in his chair and cranes his neck to look up at Shelley, upside-down.

'What would you do?' he asks the portrait. His limbs feel weighted, his eyelids weighted. He smells of rain, still, and the soft hum of the radiator soothes his mind. 'Well, I expect you wouldn't have made my mistakes in the first place, would you.'

Charles holds his breath. The room is silent; the portrait is still. Two stories below, the front door opens and closes. He breathes out, and he closes his eyes. Rain taps at the window.

-

When he returns to his house, there is silence. The house is dark. The rain has stopped falling. In the foyer, Charles drops his satchel and umbrella to the floor, kicks off his shoes, tugs his jumper over his head and tosses it over the back of a chair. 

'I've returned,' he says. Then, into the darkness, into the silence: 'Welcome back, Professor Xavier. You taught brilliantly today.'

When he retires to bed—retreats—he cools himself in the blue of his bed-sheets, lavender-scented, a spray of calm in the ochre of his bedroom. Afloat, he reads; and when sleep takes him, he dreams of the Rhine as seen by Byron's Harold, bright and brilliant and pure—dreams of himself swept into the cold of that exulting and abounding river.


	2. of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy one year anniversary, XMFC fandom. Just one note, this time: in this AU, Raven is Charles' biological sister.

When August yields itself to September, school begins in earnest. Charles sinks himself into work, submerges himself in verse and fiction 'til his shirts are ink-stained and he coughs from book-dust. He spends nights in his study, microwaving a meal when he remembers to eat, sleeping half-clothed on the leather sofa. He feels, sometimes, as if he has been transported again to the days before he presented his thesis at Oxford, when he was sleepless and drunk on his own brilliance, Raven always at his side. 'I love you,' she had said, 'but if you say one more word about your thesis, I promise to disown you.' In the absence of Raven, Charles reads his work aloud to the bust of Homer he keeps on a pedestal in the study. 

He feels his classes as though they are palpable brightness, shining and sparkling, the shivering white of diamonds from the timed delineation of his week-day schedule. When there are no classes, there is the written word, and little else.

But the written word, however it may buoy him, is not quite the Α and the Ω. In the quiet breaks between classes, Charles finds himself crossing and double-crossing the quad, accompanying himself on the grand tour of the campus, journeying from the northernmost edge to the southernmost. When he passes Snowe Hall—which houses the Art History department—he ambles, and the length of his steps lessen into feeble shuffles until he has taken himself past the building. He brings a book on his travels, but surreptitiously peeks over the top of it as he walks.

It is during one of these Snowe Hall shuffles that Charles becomes aware of a grievously noisy rattle-thrum, some beastly clamor that approaches fast behind him. When he turns, book held in front of him, he sees the streak of a motorcycle—a streetfighter, bright and black and quick—in a rip through the green of Snowe Boulevard; it passes close enough to make his fringe flutter. He drops his book, and catches it in midair. 

When the rider dismounts in the small staff parking lot, he lifts off his helmet, shakes his hair out. The rider, Charles realizes—as classic as one jodhpur-clad and red-coated at a dismount from his stallion—is Professor Lehnsherr. He passes Charles on the walkway to Snowe Hall—and he regards Charles differently than he had before, no longer dismissive and aloof. The wind breaks through the trees, and the pages of Charles' book curl onto his fingers, and Charles wonders if Lehnsherr views art the way he views him—cold and exacting and quietly enthralled.

'I haven't got a coffee,' Charles says, 'so it's all right to approach, now. The worst I could possibly do is drop my book on you.'

A small cruel curve of a smile lifts the corners of Lehnsherr's lips—disappears, then. His gaze flicks down to the title of Charles' book— _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ —and when it returns to Charles, he feels as if his essence unfolds under Lehnsherr's stare, the soft meat of the center of a blossom drawn out tender in the chill of the breeze.

'Ein buch für alle und keinen,' Lehnsherr says. 'Do you realize you haven't introduced yourself, yet?' 

Charles wonders if there is any need at all. Still, he closes his book and tucks it under his left arm and extends his right to shake, feels it clasped for a moment in the broad, strong grasp of Lehnsherr's hand. 

'Charles Xavier, Professor of Literature. And you're Professor Lehnsherr—Art History. Hailing from the Berlin University of the Arts.'

Lehnsherr smiles fully, and Charles sees why he doesn't, usually. His lips seem to split, draw back, widening his mouth into an endless row of sharp white teeth. It is a smile more menacing than amused. 

'Do you research everyone who you spill coffee on?' Lehnsherr asks. His voice makes Charles feel the weight of his attention, holds Charles in thrall. '—Or have I become famous?' 

'Infamous, I'd say. But I don't mean to dissuade you—you've warded quite a few students toward declaring an English major.' 

Lehnsherr lifts his shoulders in the same quiet shrug that Charles had seen on the first day of classes. His smile becomes closed-mouthed, secretive.

'You must have overheard my conversation with the head of the department.' His gaze seems to lessen in scope, to focus on Charles completely. 'I'm curious why a professor of literature would visit the Art History department.'

'I have an interest in the field.' Charles pushes the lie out quickly, easily, without hesitation. The lie grows before he can quell his mounting curiosity. 'I wanted to know if I might sit in on one of your classes—it isn't every year that we're joined by a professor of your caliber. I'm very quiet, you know, and don't take up very much space.'

Charles gives his most winning of smiles, and is met with an expression that is much like what he would expect from a father appraising his young daughter's first love.

After a long stretch of anticipation, Lehnsherr says, 'Art History 300 is at nine-thirty on Mondays and Wednesdays. Reed Theatre.' Then, in warning: 'If you attend class as a student would, I expect you to participate as a student would.'

When Charles walks to his next class, there is a spring in his step, his book under his arm and his hair in the wind.

-

As Dr. MacTaggert passes Charles in the pressing corridors of Thornton Hall—the home of most of the humanities classes—Charles turns on his heel to fall into step next to her.

'Dr. MacTaggert,' he says. His voice is marked by the sparkling tone that precedes a request. 'Good afternoon.'

'You look like you were just invited to be the fifth guest at the Villa Diodati,' she tells him. They turn a sharp corner, and Charles nearly collides with a gaggle of students, steps out of the way just in time.

'If that were the case,' Charles says, 'you would find me face-down on the floor, having fainted. You would have to resurrect me with _sal volatile_. Luckily I'm still in possession of all of my faculties. But I _was_ invited to be a guest of something else—and I have a favor to ask of you.'

She arches her eyebrow, watches him with a half-hidden interest. 'Well,' she says, 'tell me more.'

'I seem to have launched an informal investigation into this new professor _aus Deutschland_ ,' he explains, gesturing vaguely with his hands as he speaks. 'We ran into each other earlier today—he knows a bit about Nietzsche, apparently—well, one thing led to another, and he's given me the all-clear to sit in on a class of his—the class that's somehow draining the Art History department of all of their students.' 

'Where do I come in?' she asks. They descend into the narrow twist of the stairwell.

'Ah—yes, well. The rub is that _his_ class begins at nine-thirty on Mondays and Wednesdays—'

'—Which is the same time as your class on the Gilded Age, and you want me to fill in for you next Monday so you can stalk an art history professor because you think he's ruining learning.'

'I don't think that any longer,' Charles protests, lifting his hands. 'I'm simply curious. And I have a burgeoning interest in art history.'

'Name one artist you like.'

Charles plumbs the depths of his mind, searches for the name of an artist—any artist. Van Gogh? Monet? Manet? As they pass through to the corridors of the second storey, he makes an attempt with: '...Michelangelo?' At Dr. MacTaggert's snort, he adds, 'I did say it was a _burgeoning_ interest.'

When they reach the door to Dr. MacTaggert's classroom, she turns to him; she rests her hand on the door-knob, sighs and says, 'In the interest of broadening your horizons—' 

A smile breaks onto her lips—and a smile breaks onto Charles'.

-

The library is the second-oldest building of Haworth's campus. It is a noble, Gothic treasure of a building, a place that cools Charles with its hush and reverence, takes him into its labyrinth of shelves and corridors and hides him from the world. It holds, Charles knows, a collection of first-edition classics so extensive that it rivals his own. This afternoon, Charles does not make his usual move towards the shelves of fiction: he studies the directory and ascends the worn wooden stairs to the mezzanine, scanning the brass placards on the aisles until he reaches the section that houses books on art history.

Art History 300, according to the description in the course catalog, is an in-depth study of Western art since the High Renaissance. Charles does not spare himself: he takes books on Bellini, Tintoretto, Il Greco, Caravaggio—spreads onward into history, plucks tomes on Romanticism and Naturalism—progresses to Fauvism, to Cubism, to Dada. When he begins to make his way back to the circulation desk, a stack of books piled in his arms that reach up to his chin, he chances a glimpse through the arched windows and sees that the sun is setting, that the sky is the thin violet of seven in the evening. 

The undergraduate at the circulation desk glances at the mass of books he unloads onto the desk and says, 'You must be taking Art History with Professor Lehnsherr.' There is a note of pity in her voice. Before Charles can reply in the affirmative, she sees his I.D. card—sees that it is marked as 'faculty' (along with an unflattering photograph)—and her eyes widen. 'Sorry, I didn't realize you were a professor.'

'No, no—' Charles waves his aching hands. 'You were correct about the course, in a manner of speaking. Are you taking it? I'm curious to know.'

As she scans his books, she looks up at him, raises an eyebrow. 'I _was_ taking it—I dropped it, I mean. It might be rude to say this—I know he's supposed to be really fantastic at art history, and I guess he is—but Professor Lehnsherr is just...' She considers it for a moment, pensively brushing a finger over her bottom lip before shrugging and returning to the scanner. 'Intense would be the word. He just assumes all of us desperately need to be art historian of the century—but, I mean, I'm going to go to law school after I graduate.'

Charles thanks her—bids her good luck in law school—and makes his way towards the entrance. He leaves the library with the sum of nearly seven centuries of artistic endeavour held in his arms; he has four days in which to absorb all the linseed and pigment of splendors past, and he intends to make the most of it.

-

On Saturday morning—in the pliant hours of breakfast and brunch, of sunlit cocktails over sopressa and polenta—Charles eats at a restaurant on a long shaded road between his house and the university. He sits on the patio, soaks in the last warmth of the season, sees the white of his plate rendered pale grey and yellow through the half-shade of the trees. Next to his plate sits a large, glossy volume on German Romantic art. When his phone begins to ring—a tone in bright chimes that eases into the mind rather than jarring it—he is slow in setting down his fork, in turning his eyes from the page to slide his phone from his pocket and tap the screen and hold it to his ear.

'Good morning,' he says. He smiles as he speaks. '—Or afternoon, rather, for you. But it is a good day, at any rate, morning or afternoon—I thought you had forgotten me.'

'Sorry, sorry, I'm sorry—I've been so busy I haven't had time to breathe,' Raven tells him. Through the thin connection between New York and Stratford-upon-Avon, her voice is hushed and static-blurred; but there is a vigor to her words, a barely-contained fizz beneath the surface of her voice. 'If you're holding something, put it down, or you're going to drop it. I have news.'

'Do tell.' 

When she speaks, she lets her words fall out in one burst, an expansion of glitter and zeal: 'I'm going to be Ophelia!' 

'Raven!' Charles shouts so loudly that the diners on the patio turn to look at him. His grin splits his lips ear-to-ear. 'Hadn't I told you— _months ago,_ even—and you were so entirely unconvinced—'

'So you had more faith in me than I did,' she says. Her smile—the roll of her eyes—is audible. 'Charles Xavier: correct about everything, even his little sister's prospects for the stage. So it is, so it's been. Don't boast.' 

She tells him of the role, of her company, of costume fittings and grueling rehearsals—relays anecdotes of her companions' gaffes, of midnights spent laughing and drinking, all of them together in a motley family so unlike that of Hamlet's own—of Raven and Charles' own.

Charles thinks, as she speaks, of the nights that they had spent more than a decade before—he and his sister huddled together over leather-bound copies of Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice—Charles jotting notes in tired scrawl, Raven lowering the lines from her lips in quiet cadence. When his memory wanders back into the years of single digit ages, the sunlight seems to darken, to cast his mind into the dust and polish of Westchester. ('An actress,' their mother had said, once. She had laughed, had raised her martini to her lips. 'Raven, you're hardly Sarah Bernhardt. When your roles disappear, how will you feed yourself? Will you take the _role_ of a lover, then? 'Oh' and 'ah' haven't quite the challenge of 'too like the lightning which doth cease to be—')

'What about you?' Raven asks; Charles reels from the sudden yield of the past to the present. 'I haven't spoken to you since—summer break, wasn't it—you've started the semester, haven't you? If you have stories, yet, don't withhold.'

Pieces of childhood's memory still cling to the edges of Charles' mind; he attempts to shake them away, to bury them under the fresh reminiscences of the weeks past.

'As a matter of fact... Do you remember last year, when I spilled coffee all over the lap of a poor history professor? Well, it happened again, unbelievably—'

'No,' she says, 'That's believable.'

'—This time with a visiting professor, of all people—an art historian from Berlin. I don't think he's quite forgiven me, yet—for that matter neither has the history professor—but I intend to dazzle him with my new-found knowledge of art history, so forgiveness may be on the horizon yet.'

'I'm beginning to think you're spilling coffee on everyone you meet, all in case one of them will be your soul-mate and you'll have a funny story to tell at your wedding. Is he young, then? Fit?'

Charles feels a heat rising in his cheeks. 'He's the new _terror of Haworth_ , Raven. It'll be all I can do to keep him from glaring daggers at me each time we pass each other on campus.'

He promptly changes the subject.

-

As Charles returns to the house, Raven's voice stays at a fading echo in the back of his mind, a strange mingling of her at eleven and her at twenty-two, the pain of the past made clear through the triumph of the present. So, too, stays the echo of his mother's voice, distorted over the fields of time: _too like the lightning which doth cease to be—_

In his study, he puts a record on, settles in at his desk and allows the soft clamor of Vivaldi to quell the sounds of it all. He pours himself a scotch, and brings it to his mouth, and is struck by the memory of the way his mother would touch her red-stained lips to the rim of a glass. He sets his scotch down, then, and leaves it. 

He wonders, in an obscure part of his mind, whether she is well—whether she drinks, still—whether she is in love with his step-father, or ever was—whether she speaks to Raven, if she does not speak to Charles. Whether she wears the same bright dresses. Whether she visits his father's grave. He sees her, sometimes, in the 'who's who' and 'who's where' of the New York papers—'Matriarch of Xavier Family at Met Gala', 'Sharon Xavier and Anna Wintour, Expatriates at Le Caprice', 'The End of the Xavier Dynasty?'. In the photographs, her hair is greying, and gems are at her fingers, and her skin is stretched tight over her collarbones. He recalls that he had left biannual messages with her personal assistant until his last year at Oxford; he had gone so far as to dial the number, the last time, before something had broken within him—disconnected, set free, a ship trailing away from its anchor. On the second ring, he had hung up, and that was the end. Raven had tried for longer.

He wants to go out. He wants to speak to someone—to speak to them about nothing, and feign insipidity, and have sex—wants to feel that there is someone who would like to kiss his mouth, to undress him, to tangle their hands in his hair and pull his head back until his throat is bare and white in the moonlight. He does. 

-

Monday morning breaks under the cast of clouds. Rain seems to tease at the sky—a dapple of drops, and then dryness, and then a new quick spatter of wetness that disappears into the grey. As Charles bathes and dresses, he thinks of Professor Lehnsherr—Dr. Erik Lehnsherr, according to the staff listing on Haworth's website. He wonders if there is anyone who calls him Erik. He thinks of Lehnsherr rising from bed, showering, shaving, pulling a black polo neck jumper over his head and buckling his belt, drinking a glass of orange juice, or perhaps an espresso—wonders if Lehnsherr thinks of him, anticipates his presence in the class ahead. Is he angry, Charles wonders—is he pleased?

At nine twenty-eight, Charles takes a seat in the back of Reed Theatre, hides himself in the depth and the darkness of the room. Lehnsherr arrives on the dot: no earlier, no later. His gaze slides up to the back of the theatre—lingers on Charles—slides down to the notes at the lectern, then. Class begins.

From the first flare of color spread across the screen—rich crimson, sable and ebony and pearl—Charles is thrust into the shine and spin of Lehnsherr's universe. If Charles is a man of the invisible—of the illusive, the impalpable, the grand rhymed imaginings of fiction and falseness—Lehnsherr is a man of the visible, the brilliant progeny of Gautier's _homme pour qui le monde visible existe._ To him, all art is visible: the subtle spinning threads of truth beneath the oils sing true to him, and with a flick of his tongue, sharp words through his teeth, he uncovers their nature—bares those threads of truth to his students, brings them up into the shock of understanding. A man is not a man, a bird is not a bird, red is not red; what is true is true, and that is all.

The students do not quite understand. Charles watches the expressions on their faces, sees the raise of a brow or teeth worrying at lips, the frenzied scratching of pens at paper. Lehnsherr does not attempt, as Charles does, to coax understanding from them. He demands it. When he poses a question, hands tremble into rising—and if the student does not _try_ , Lehnsherr compels their minds to grind into action, into contemplation, into heaving dizzying effort. He takes them off-guard, sweeps their feet out from under them and tells them to rise, again.

Charles begins to understand, then, how Lehnsherr has come to be feared. There is nothing more truly frightening than thought. 

Towards the end of the class, an image rises onto onto the screen: a man in black and a woman in green stand together, hands clasped, a dog at their feet and a chandelier above them. Charles realizes, with a quickening heart and dampening palms, that he recognizes it—that he recognizes the question Lehnsherr is posing. 

A student risks a raise of the hand, stumbles through his words. 'Well, the woman is... Pregnant? So it symbolizes, um, birth—and new beginnings—?'

Charles is interrupting before he realizes it. 

'The truth of the painting isn't the painting itself,' he says, voice steady, hands quivering, mouth dry. 'It's the mirror _in_ the painting. If it is a wedding, there must be a witness—and the mirror is the eternal witness—the Eye of God. While the painting preserves the surface of the ceremony, the mirror provides a window into the _actuality_ of it. Van Eyck didn't convey the matter by painting the figures themselves—the scene in the foreground is the representation of a _pretense_ of a certain reality, but the mirror reminds us of reality itself.'

Charles watches, waits. A slow silence passes through the theatre; he can hear the soft whirr and hum of the projector, the shift of bodies against chairs. At the front of the room, Lehnsherr latches his gaze to Charles. A small smile lifts Lehnsherr's lips, and Charles feels as if there is a secret hidden in the gleam of his eye.

'Almost,' Lehnsherr says. 'Almost.'

-

'Walk with me,' Charles tells Lehnsherr, after class is dismissed. The clouds have parted from the sky, and a tender sunlight paints the brick and grass, and the two of them turn from the entrance of Reed Theatre to begin a slow amble down the path towards the quad.

'Have you had enough, yet?' Lehnsherr asks. He looks at the path ahead of him, towards the horizon, the spreading green and fog of the quad dotted with students.

'Oh,' Charles laughs, lacing his hands behind his back. 'Not in the least. You were absolutely brilliant, you know. But I doubt you're told that very often.' 

'Does it matter that I'm not?' Lehnsherr looks down at Charles, then. He seems to view Charles as if he were farther away than he really is, shrouded and contemplative.

Charles smiles at Lehnsherr—and watches him, keeps his gaze on Lehnsherr's face, studies it for a sign of change. Lehnsherr's face stays still. 

'I believe,' Charles says, 'that people ought to be told they are wonderful. It's very simple.'

'And if they aren't wonderful?'

A distinct shiver skates up Charles' spine; he thinks it must be the wind, and pulls his jacket tighter around him. Beneath the chill of the wind, he senses the particular feeling that he is being asked an unanswerable question. He attempts it regardless.

'Then they ought to be told they have the potential to be wonderful.'

Lehnsherr casts his gaze away, sweeps his vision out over the join of the trees and the sky. That wide smile of his returns, for a moment, before hiding itself again. 

'Don't you recall,' Lehnsherr asks Charles, 'what happened to Candide?' 

In the briskness of the autumn air, Charles tosses his head back and laughs. It is not his only-Charles summer-sun chuckle, not his deep inwards laugh—it has a coldness to it, a slight metallic tinge that makes Lehnsherr alert. Charles controls himself, brings his smile back into warmth, returns himself to benign placidity.

'Do you know—listening to your lecture made me wish I were a student again,' Charles says. 

'You're a strange man,' Lehnsherr replies. 

They reach the quad; they walk together, then, under the tall trees that line the walkways, in and out of shade and sunlight as they stroll, the colors of their skin and their hair growing brighter and duller in the shift of the leaves.

'Would you believe me if I told you that you have as much potential as anyone else? I think that no one quite understands you, yet. It must make you angry—that all of what you know is so utterly obvious to you, and so utterly impenetrable to everyone else. It's tiring, isn't it?'

'I'm not tired,' Lehnsherr tells him. 

'Angry, then.' 

Lehnsherr says nothing for a long while. He watches the pavement ahead of them, crosses his arms over his chest in solemn contemplation. When he speaks, finally, he says, 'You don't know everything, Charles Xavier.' 

'But you aren't denying it.' A smile quirks the corner of Charles' mouth. 'I know it as well as you do. The frustration—the disappointment. The fear that however hard you might work, your students will never make as much of an attempt as you'd like them to. But you can't _force_ them. There will be some who will learn, and some who won't, and the most you can do is give yourself to the ones who will.' 

'No,' Lehnsherr says. There is a tension to his voice, to his face, to his body; he is pulled tight, has the sheen and coldness of steel. 'I don't believe that.' 

In the center of the walkway, Charles stops. He turns to Lehnsherr—looks into his eyes—sees the pattern of sunlight across his skin, the slight rustle of their coats with the breeze. It is quiet, and Charles feels as if they are, for a moment, forsaken—as if they have carried themselves to the depths of the sea, where it is silent and cold and solitary.

'You must let go,' Charles tells him. He tilts his head up, knits his brow, pleads softly with his voice and with his eyes. 'I've seen a dozen professors—a dozen brilliant men, as brilliant as you are—simply destroy themselves (and I do mean _destroy themselves,_ and it's an awful thing)—because they don't understand that they must let go.'

In slow measure—after the first deep drink of air—Lehnsherr exhales. Charles can see, in the periphery of his vision, the way that Lehnsherr's shoulders fall. When Lehnsherr looks away, they rise to the surface, are brought back to the light and sound of the world. Colors are clearer, and light is brighter, and the wind is colder.

'As I said—' Lehnsherr's voice is low and deep and hushed, and he speaks to Charles as if he does not know whether to be furious or melancholy. '—You don't know everything.' 

'But I do.' 

And even then, Charles realizes that he does not know what Lehnsherr means when he looks at him that way.

-

'How goes your informal investigation?' Dr. MacTaggert asks him, when she comes up to his office to deliver a sheaf of photocopies. 

There is a silence—Charles reads and rereads the same line, worrying his fingers over the back of his book. Dr. MacTaggert has to clear her throat before he looks up at her.

'Oh! Goodness,' he says, marking his place and resting his book on his desk. 'I'm sorry—I must have been drifting. Are those the copies?' 

'Did you miss my question?' She leaves the folder on the edge of his desk, in a small clear spot among the seascape of papers. 'I asked you about your big investigation. Your class went fine, by the way. No need to thank me.'

' _Thank_ you,' he tells her, nodding his head in coy concession. 'It went— I'm not certain that I know how to put it.' 

'That bad?' A smile curves her lips; she watches him slyly, as if she had expected it.

'No, on the contrary.' Charles rests his chin in his hand, matches her smile. 'It was really quite astounding. I suppose I was expecting him to interrogate his students with a gun to their heads, but—' He gives a short shrug, his gaze drifting into the distance. 'As I said, on the contrary.' 

'Don't get too attached,' she says, resting her hand on her hip. 'I have my own classes to teach.' 

'He knows a bit about Voltaire, too. I wouldn't have thought.' 

'Be careful. Before you know it, he'll be taking over your position. Anyway, I've got to get out of here—'

'Go on, then—' And as she turns, he says, 'But I must tell you, you've done something immeasurable for me. I can't thank you enough.'

'Whatever you say,' she says. She shrugs and waves goodbye as she departs.

-

All that Lehnsherr had said—all that Charles had said—stays like a fading chime in Charles' mind, repeats itself and reworks itself, comes to him in new tones and endless variation. Their voices sound different, when Charles recalls it; they are quieter, and louder, and hidden inflections reveal themselves. Charles reads and writes and works; he attempts to submerge himself, again, and finds that he cannot—that he is borne always to the surface of the currents, breathless and disoriented. 

_But I do,_ he had said; and he repeats it to himself, thinks: _I do know everything. I do know. I know. I do._ And Lehnsherr's words reclaim him: _you don't, you don't, you don't._

Charles teaches, and he thinks of Lehnsherr; he stands at the front of the class and wonders, each time a student makes a half-attempt at a meek, placating comment, whether they would not grow stronger if he were austere and relentless, if he spoke harshly and taught harshly, if he did not allow them to slide into leisure and 'well-that's-good-enough' comfort. He cannot bring himself to do it. He is kind and calm and tender. He says, 'I understand,' or 'it's all right,' or 'perhaps next time.' There will always be, he knows, light and dark. He is the light, and has always been the light; if he changed, he wonders, would he be untrue to himself?

When he sees water—the pale drowning hues of the lake at the edge of campus, or morning dew on cold green leaves—he thinks of the color of Lehnsherr's eyes.

-

A week after Lehnsherr's class—a week, exactly, both of them apart in that dreary enchantment of Monday mid-morning—Charles reads Coleridge to his students. He sits on his desk and allows his legs to dangle, his toes to brush the tile; and he reads quietly and slowly, and watches branches, still leaf-clad, trail their fingers against the window-panes. He hears the low steady noise of the radiators, and thinks of the sound of the wind—of the way it had sounded as he and Lehnsherr walked together on the quad, and of the way it had felt at his skin, and of the fading green of the autumn grass, whispers of ripples through a million small blades.

'Professor Xavier?' he hears—and he looks up, sees the faces of his students, bewildered and dubious.

He realizes too late that the classroom had shifted into quiet—that his own voice had trailed into silence, the poem half-finished, ink abandoned on its page.

'Are you all right?' a student asks him.

He finds himself smiling. There is a certain warmth in his chest, in his cheeks, that lights him inwardly. 

'I'm very well,' he says, and reads on.


	3. Alone, alone,—all, all alone; alone on a wide, wide sea.

There is, nestled in a hushed, dusty alcove of Haworth's library, a rosewood and mahogany chess table; on both sides rest moth-eaten armchairs; the scene is framed by a lofty, age-dimmed Gothic window. The chess table had belonged, in the late 19th century, to a professor of Greek, and upon his sudden death during a lecture on Theocritus' Idylls, the set was bestowed upon the library. 

Charles had discovered it during his first year of teaching. He had often taken himself to the library, then, feigning some need for research so that he might take solace in the rich scent and the rich quiet. It was a gracious place: it was not his new house, solitary in the winding valley to the north of Haworth—and it was not 1407 Graymalkin Lane. Charles was glad for that. 

His father, before his death, taught Charles to play; when Charles would play against himself, in those first months at Haworth, he imagined that he played against his father, again, that a kind shade of the man sat in the chair across from him, gentle fingers across the crowns of the pieces. In time, other members of the faculty—ambitious students, sometimes—discovered Charles' hiding-spot. They invited themselves to play, and for a year, he trounced them all. It was after he had soundly beaten a tenured Professor of Mathematics that he was unofficially shunned from the chess set in the library. 'You shouldn't make such a show of yourself,' one of the other professors had said.

It has been four years since Charles had last played there. After he returns his books on art history, however, he makes his way through the strange maze of shelves to find the alcove. He thinks that if he could perhaps breathe the scent of it, again, he could recall to him that singular strain of contentedness.

Instead, he sees the strong, severe profile of Professor Lehnsherr, silhouetted in dark shadow against the bright fog-grey of the window. The second armchair is empty. One hand rubs across his chin, fingers slowly working at the skin over his jawbone; the other hand carefully lifts a knight, the base of the piece hovering in its suspension. With a quiet tap, the black knight comes down to its square. Lehnsherr looks as if he is waging a silent, ruthless war. 

He does not know that he is not alone, yet, Charles realizes. This is the way that Lehnsherr appears when he believes he is alone; he is, now, who he is when no-one else is looking. That, perhaps, is why his edges seemed to have softened—not into kindness, but into a resigned melancholy, something that smooths down the tautness of his shoulders, lessens the wrinkles of his brow and deepens the corners of his mouth. Charles feels as if he has happened onto something secret—that he ought to go, that he ought to leave hidden what is hidden.

When he turns to leave, there is a soft shuffling noise of the soles of his shoes against the carpet; then there is the sound of the armchair creaking. Charles turns his head—and sees the vividness of Lehnsherr's gaze, sun-blinding in the darkness of the alcove. So he turns back. 

'It's a bit funny that you play, really,' he says. He offers a weak smile through the regret of intrusion. 'I hadn't supposed we would have very much in common.'

'Sit,' Lehnsherr tells him. He gestures with a sweep of the hand to the empty armchair. When Charles hesitates, he says, '—If you think you can beat me. Otherwise, go.'

Charles sits. Across from Lehnsherr, Charles can see the side of Lehnsherr's face that is lit by the quiet light from the window, steady and grey-blue, bringing forth the sharp line of Lehnsherr's cheek-bone, the rigid set of his lips, the slope of his forehead.

'To be honest,' Charles confesses, with a conspiratorial glance and quirk of lip cast towards Lehnsherr, 'I'm not really meant to be here at all. I've found there's no better way to make all the world hate you than to be better at them than something.' He takes up, mid-game, with the white pieces; slowly, with his fingers rising unconsciously to his temple, he surveys Lehnsherr's strategy. '—By that,' he adds, 'I mean I won one too many games and now I'm _persona non grata_ at any campus chess table.'

'Do you really think they hate you?' Lehnsherr asks. He shifts to sit back in the armchair, crossing his arms over his chest, biding his time until Charles makes his move. 

'I think they utterly _despise_ me.' But the way Charles says it is like laughing. 'I imagine you know precisely the type of hatred I mean. Hasn't anyone ever told you to be a bit less brilliant at analyzing art?'

'But that isn't hatred.' 

And the way Lehnsherr says hatred—the sharpness of the word, the depth to it—plunges Charles into a swirl of _mother—father—Kurt—Cain—1407 Graymalkin—but Raven, but Raven—fists, knuckles, the snap of the bridge of a nose—blood on tile, porcelain, mahogany—_

He shakes it off, and he makes his move, and Lehnsherr says ' _well._ ' It is haughty, presumptuous and cold, and Charles understands, for a slight second, how all of his other opponents must have felt, hearing him laugh at them for their mistakes.

'Oh.' Charles arches an eyebrow. 'Are you under the impression that I've made a misstep? Because I can assure you that I haven't.' 

Lehnsherr shrugs, watches Charles with eyes half-lidded in languid contemplation. 'I won't aid the enemy,' he says, and there is a certain chill that takes Charles, at that. 

'Am I really the enemy?'

'The opposition, then. In this circumstance.' And the chill settles, lessens. 'Does it upset you, the thought of enemies? The thought of yourself being an enemy?'

'It's only a chess game,' Charles says; he gives his tone the best of his lightheartedness. 'But I suppose that it would, in greater affairs. Of course it hurts when my _students_ believe I'm the enemy—well, you don't seem to mind.'

Lehnsherr tenses—Charles sees the way he sits up, slightly, the way his eyes lose their contemplative haziness, and Charles feels the certain dread of having made a mistake. 

Quickly, Charles amends with, 'Not that I believe you _are_ their enemy—' But the damage is done. 

'Is that what they believe? That I'm against them?' 

'I couldn't know anything for certain.' Charles crosses his legs, places his hands primly at his knee. 'Try as I might—and I do try—students will never be as free with a professor as they will with each other. But it isn't necessary to have 'insider knowledge' to understand that some resentment does tend to build when one tricks Haworth students into making themselves look the fool.' 

'How else will they learn?' Lehnsherr is frowning at him—or perhaps not at him, but at something further away, internal. He gives a dissonant, frustrated gesture of hand. 'They didn't come here to be coddled.'

'I think you've been defeating your own purpose. When a person has been bitten, they don't progress—they recoil.' 

Lehnsherr says nothing, but knocks one of Charles' pawns from the board and leaves it on its side. Charles wonders if the other chessmen weep for their brother-in-arms.

'How long have you been a professor?' Lehnsherr asks. 

'Five years.' Charles reaches out to take the pawn from its dying ground, to place it at the edge of the set. If he sets it upright, does he resurrect it, there in safety? 

'Really.' There is a disconcerting slip of a smile on Lehnsherr's lips; he looks up from the board, watches Charles. 'You're young.'

'Oh, you say that as if you're seventy.' Charles bats a hand dismissively. 'Don't be so eager to make yourself seem like an old sod; you'll have plenty of time for that when you _are_ one. How old are you?'

'Isn't that a bit of a personal thing to ask someone you hardly know?' Lehnsherr asks—but there is an unfiltered amusement in the low flare of his eyes. 'Tell me how old you are, first, before I answer. For the sake of a level playing field.'

'Twenty-six,' Charles says. 'I hope you won't rescind your promise, now.'

'Then you were twenty-one,' Lehnsherr says. 'At the very beginning. Younger than that when you earned your degrees.' 

When Lehnsherr says it, Charles feels as if it is momentous, as if he had accomplished something. He hadn't, and he reminds himself of that. To earn his PhD at barely twenty-one—a feat? He had always been told so, but had never felt so. It served to bolster his ego, perhaps, to quantify his intelligence to those around him, to reward him for a mental strength that had existed far before the work of Oxford, of Harvard. It did not do a thing for anyone else, for any one of the seven billion lives on the planet apart from Charles'; that was why it did not matter. Charles' importance—if ever he could grasp at true importance—arrived when he began to teach. To have done anything else with his mind would have been selfish. ( _But weren't you always selfish?_ Charles' mind echoes.)

As he thinks, Charles rests his forearms along the velvet of the chair's arms, feels his fingers over the texture of the velvet, and casts his gaze out to the window to watch the courtyard of the library. Some students pass through the courtyard, but none linger.

Charles looks back towards Lehnsherr. 'You didn't answer my question,' he says.

'Thirty-five,' Lehnsherr tells him; and with that, Charles is content. 

By mid-game, Charles begins to worry. He had been playing kindly, at first, under the impression that if he beat Lehnsherr, the man would become another member of the resentful masses—but slowly, it comes to him that Lehnsherr had been doing the same. He deepens his strategy, then, recalls all that his father had taught him, all that he had learned from reviewing the games of the masters; and as Lehnsherr follows, Charles is taken by the creeping realization that he is about to lose. When his last tricks are exhausted, Lehnsherr declares a resigned 'checkmate'. Charles sighs, sits back in his chair, gazes upon the emptied board. 

'I really thought I would beat you,' Charles says. 'I'm entirely stunned.' His voice holds an air of exaggerated glumness; inside, he is overjoyed. 

'Every streak has its end.' Lehnsherr begins replacing the pieces to their positions. 'Play me again, some time, if you think you can risk it.' 

'I will,' Charles says. He smiles. 

Lehnsherr stays solemn—but there is something hidden underneath the surface of the solemnity, some nuanced, intangible, ever-shifting mass that Charles senses and cannot understand; it rises from him like the faint tangle of roots at the base of an old oak.

-

Charles loves teaching; he thinks that he was born to do it, that no profession is nobler, that to educate the minds of the next generation is to gift something immeasurable to the future. Even then, he is not entirely resilient against the unique drudgeries of the position.

As he works his way through a student's paper, evening sky in pure violet through the window of his study, he finds that his eyelids grow heavy—that his eyes skim the words without absorbing them, that his pen hand grows limp until his script is an illegible scrawl. Schubert's Serenade plays as a soft caress, sound faintly crackled in the record's age; Charles thinks dimly that the music is beautiful, and that it would be more beautiful if it came to him through the veil of sleep, if it were some ethereal tonic to color his dreams. 

But a noise rises beneath the sound of the record; it presses against the strain of the orchestra, lifts Charles from the blur of near-sleep. Slowly, he comes to recognize it as the sound of his ringtone. He considers, for a moment, tossing his mobile through the window, tossing the paper through the window, and curling up to sleep on the sofa in the same way that he had done for the past four nights. Even in addled exhaustion, he convinces himself that it would be a poor course of action, and rises to lift the needle from the record before glancing at his iPhone. 

The caller ID reads as an unknown New York number. The string of digits seems familiar to him, somehow—but anyone who might have any intention of calling his personal number would be in his address book. He scrubs his hand over his face, blinks to relieve the dryness of his eyes, and answers the call. 

'Charles Xavier.' His voice sounds as asleep as he feels; his name, as much as he wills himself to lucidity, comes out something like 'sssharlesessavier'.

Wakefulness comes by force, then, when he recognizes the voice that replies. It is his mother's personal assistant. In an instant, he is awake, and he is angry. 

'Your mother—'

'—Would do very well to leave me be,' he interrupts. 

He feels his furor bend him, twist him, force him into the old skin, that of the Charles he had meant to leave behind; and the Charles of the present tells him, 'that is not now, this is not then'—but a rupture of childhood returns to him regardless, drives itself into his mind, makes him hear the sound of her voice—the sound of her laugh, the way it was when it was cruel—the scent of her perfume, and the hue of her hair—Raven, six years old and sob-reddened at the foot of his bed—Cain, bloody-mouthed and snarling—the sight of Kurt in his coffin, the sight of his father in his coffin. _That is not now,_ he reminds himself. _This is not then._

'Dr. Xavier, please, your mother needs—' 

'—I don't give a damn if she needs to speak to me—if she needs me—if she needs my _money,_ which I imagine is what this call is about—'

'Dr. Xavier, I apolog—' 

Charles ends the call. It is a wave breaking against the shore, receding into the ocean; his past returns to the depths of him, existent but indefinite. The room is still, then, and silent.

He feels the weight of his phone in his hands, the hardness of it against the softness of his palm. Before he can allow himself to doubt, he dials Raven's number. It rings ten times before she picks up. 

'Charles—' She sounds as if she is sleep-talking. 'It's past midnight, Jesus Christ. I have to wake up early tomorrow. What do you want?' 

Charles hesitates—he thinks of what he might say, and he thinks of Raven's sadness, of her anger, and his heart clutches at the thought—and he says, 'It's nothing. I'm sorry. Really, I am. It was nothing. And it was stupid of me not to think of the time. Go back to sleep.' 

She hangs up. 

He fixes himself a glass of scotch and returns to grading papers. He works more quickly, and he works in silence, and he does not feel sleep approach him. In time—in hours, or a day—he is returned fully to the present. The phone call fades from his memory. He does not wonder what his mother needed.

-

At the end of their first match, Lehnsherr had told Charles, 'play me again'. He does. He plays him again, and again, and again.

At first, their matches are infrequent, giddy surprises at unpredictable hours. Then, they begin to settle into a tentative routine, both of them drawn (in feigned surprise at the eternal mysticism of coincidence) to the alcove in the library during the hours when neither of them are working. They come to learn each other's schedules; Lehnsherr will say, 'You've got class in an hour, haven't you' and Charles will say, 'Friday, before your office hours.' Charles begins to bring coffee, as a sort of embarrassed peace offering for continuing to lose. Each time, Lehnsherr thanks him—he is curt, but it is 'thank you' nonetheless, and he drinks what Charles brings him.

Sometimes they speak of teaching—compare stories, spin tales—and of art, and of literature. Lehnsherr, with an austere type of patience, untangles the threads of art's past, lays them out for Charles to view; and Charles, as he plots his course across the board, retells the plots of his favorite novels, elucidates upon their importance to the period into which they were born. Their worlds begin to intersect; their planets begin their slow heavy pull towards each other. When they are alone, Charles feels as if they are _alone_ ; as if the window in the alcove has become a port-hole to the stars. The world revolves apart from them; they orbit each other. Charles thinks that he can feel the gravity of it—the tug at his bones, the shifting of his mental climes.

Sometimes they speak of nothing. There are days, Charles realizes, when Lehnsherr draws into himself, restrains himself from the world beyond. On those days, he is quiet, and Charles is content with allowing him to be so. It is enough to sit across from him, to watch the curve of his fingers as they reach for a chessman. Charles finds that Lehnsherr watches him, too, on those days—covertly, unobtrusively—as if Charles is something mildly beautiful that Lehnsherr perceives in the farthest recesses of his vision.

Charles does not know whether he is afraid, or whether fear is a tendency that has been ingrained in him. He does not know how he feels. Apart, he thinks—farther apart than he ever has felt. Is the difference, he wonders, that Lehnsherr is apart with him?

-

The night has run its course. The moon is full and bright in the window of Charles' study; outside of his window, leaves that were rich and golden in the sunlight are silver with the light of the moon. There in the country, apart from town or city, the sky is a jewel-box, something that Charles thinks means to blind him with its brightness; but as he drinks, the stars become less blinding, and Charles feels relief.

Earlier in the evening, he thinks that he had meant to do work. There are papers to be graded, lessons to be planned—but Charles feels himself tugged away from it, cast again into the depths. His mind wanders. When he feels that it wanders too close to the past, he re-trains it. Wonderful things, he reminds himself: the west wind. 

His laptop lays open on his desk; the screen is bright, and paints his skin in sallow glow, reflects itself in the dark of his eyes. His Haworth e-mail account displays on the screen; he closes the tab. 

Gently, gradually, an idea comes to him. He tells himself not to be ridiculous, not to be pathetic—but the thought nudges at him, presses him forward until he is typing 'Google' into the address bar, making a search for 'Erik Lehnsherr.' The first results are predictable: his faculty listing for the Berlin University of the Arts, his faculty listing for Haworth, a short article about his arrival at Haworth, a few scattered citations of his papers. 

Charles sees, then, something different: a news article, over a decade old, titled 'Where has the "Young Master" Gone?'

> "The New York Times: Arts
> 
> Where has the "Young Master" Gone?
> 
> By: Michael Ward
> 
> Published: November 18, 2001
> 
> Exactly a decade has passed since German art prodigy Erik Lehnsherr presented his final exhibition at a London gallery. During the mid- to late- 1980s, Lehnsherr was hailed as art's youngest "old master," evoking comparison to Renaissance revolutionaries Albrecht Dürer and Jan Van Eyck. From his first solo exhibition in West Berlin at age seven, Lehnsherr was lauded for his masterful control of traditional media, and when he began his apprenticeship with renowned artist Sebastian Shaw, who had made a name for himself as a child prodigy in his own right during the 1950s, their partnership took the art world by storm. Tickets to Lehnsherr's shows sold out in minutes, and original works by both Lehnsherr and Shaw fetched upwards of $50,000. By the turn of the decade, Lehnsherr's popularity showed no signs of waning: his final show, held in London in November of 1991, was attended by representatives of the Royal Family, and the gem of the collection—a portrait of Lehnsherr's mother done in the style of Van Eyck—was sold to an anonymous bidder for £15,000. Despite his financial stability and his immense popularity, that exhibition was Lehnsherr's last. Not long after the exhibition, Lehnsherr ended his apprenticeship with Shaw. Lehnsherr was only fourteen years old. Neither Lehnsherr nor Shaw have provided any explanation for his sudden departure, or for the surprising end to Lehnsherr's apprenticeship. Shaw, who continues to exhibit his work, has declined the request for an interview.
> 
> The question continues to haunt the world of international art: _Where did Erik Lehnsherr go?_ A thorough search reveals that Lehnsherr, having graduated from the University of Hamburg in 1997 with a degree in Art History, is currently a post-graduate student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. However, this information sheds little light on Lehnsherr's decision to leave the world of contemporary art. Speculations abound: some assert that Lehnsherr ended his career in art in order to focus on his education, and some assert that Lehnsherr, who is notoriously reclusive, was burdened by his explosive rise to fame. Some purport that a personal rift between Shaw and Lehnsherr caused the sudden break in partnership. "I don't believe that they got along very well, in the end," says Maria Franck, a curator who had worked closely with the pair. A personal rift between Shaw and Lehnsherr may explain the end to Lehnsherr’s apprenticeship, but it does not offer any explanation of Lehnsherr's unforeseen decision to cease producing works of art. David Greenfield, a Sotheby's Senior Specialist in contemporary fine arts, estimates that a new work by Lehnsherr would fetch upwards of $10,000 at auction. However, no new work by Lehnsherr has appeared on the market to date, and whether he continues to privately produce art is unknown. Unless Lehnsherr makes the decision to re-emerge as an artist, his inexplicable disappearance may remain one of art’s great mysteries."

He had been a prodigy, then, and had given it up. Lehnsherr's roots, his tangles of heart and mind, seem to deepen.

Charles closes the article, closes his laptop. He pads, shoeless, across the carpet, and presses his forehead to the window-glass, watches the silent shift of the trees in the wind, listens to the quiet noise of the fan in the bathroom down the hall. Lehnsherr is thirty-five, Charles thinks, and he abandoned his art at fourteen. He has lived for twenty-one years apart from his passion. Charles imagines living for twenty-one years without writing or reading; the thought makes him cold, makes his heart harden, makes his breath seem to catch in his chest.

-

Before his first class, Charles stops by Dr. MacTaggert's office, a mug of her favorite Passionfruit tea in hand. Her door is ajar; he knocks softly, nudges it open with his shoulder.

Inside, Dr. MacTaggert is bent over a cardboard box of books, shuffling through them—placing some on her bookshelf, some on her desk. Though the walls are in uniform, all austere white, Dr. MacTaggert has given the room a cheer that Charles could have never envisioned for an office: the lampshades are a canary yellow, and the light of the lamps filters into a warm glow; the bookshelves are artfully arranged; the window's shades are drawn up, and sunlight floods into the room. Behind her desk hangs a portrait of Jane Austen. 

'I thought you might have wanted a pick-me-up,' Charles says, brandishing the mug. 

Dr. MacTaggert snaps upright, raises her hands to her forehead to brush back the fly-aways escaping from her ponytail.

'Passion-fruit?' she asks; before waiting for an answer, she accepts the mug, lifts it to her nose and breathes in deeply. 'Oh, God, you're my savior. You aren't about to ask me to fill in for you again, are you?' 

'I would never be so predictable,' Charles tells her, wandering to her desk to pluck a piece of candy from the bowl on her desk. He pops a peppermint into his mouth. 'I'm a maverick. Always full of surprises.' 

'So what's the surprise today?' she asks him, after taking a long drink of her tea. 

'Did you have any earthly idea that Dr. Lehnsherr—I mean our new great art history terror—was a child art prodigy, once upon a time?' 

Dr. MacTaggert lifts her brow. 'I'd heard of Erik Lehnsherr, you know, every once in a while, when the topic of prodigies came up. But I guess I never thought deeply enough to put two and together. Why, did you?' 

'I hadn't,' Charles says, speaking around his peppermint. 'Before last night. I saw an article on the Times website from a decade ago, saying that a decade before _then,_ he had pulled a disappearing act. Left his apprenticeship, never exhibited another piece of art again. No one knows if he's still painting, even. I suppose everyone's all but given up on him.'

'Those kinds of things happen, don't they?' Dr. MacTaggert places her cup on the table and turns back to her box of books. 'Not everybody wants to do the same stuff they did when they were kids. Maybe he just got tired of it.' 

'Well, I think it's a mystery,' Charles tells her. 'If he had slowly petered out, perhaps, or drifted away, I might agree. But it was a clean break. Something made him give it up, and no one knows what it was.'

'Okay, Nancy Drew. Solve the mystery, then. Ask him about it. You guys are chums, now, right?'

'I wouldn't say _chums_ , specifically, but— Well, from my perspective, we are. Haven't the foggiest about _his_ perspective.'

'Whatever your deal is,' she says, rising up to move a book from the box to her shelf, 'Chums or not chums, I think you two should keep spending time together.' She glances at him over her shoulder, nods. 'You've been looking happier, lately.'

Charles nearly swallows his peppermint. He gives a short, sharp 'ha' and waves her away. 'You're imagining things. I brought you tea; you aren't allowed to say anything I don't agree with, today.'

'I don't take bribes,' she says, smiling. 'I take kind, well-intentioned gifts, for which I have absolutely no responsibility of recompense. Anyway, you owed me one.'

'That I did.' He returns her smile.

-

In the break between Monday's morning and afternoon classes, Charles drops in to the campus coffee shop; his tea supply is nearly depleted, and he feels the need for something strong and bitter, something that will break him from the lazy midday desire for a siesta. The shop is full, warm and coffee-scented and well-lit in the gloom of the fog-clad noon, and he has to press by a gaggle of students that crowd the doorway. After he receives his coffee, he makes his way to the tables, scanning the crowd for an open chair; he spots one, and moves forward—and sees Lehnsherr, seated at a small table by the window, a book spread out in front of him. He is quiet and studious and handsome; the shadows and shades of the small yellow lights seem to soften the air around him—and from far away, Charles nearly feels as if Lehnsherr is approachable.

'Do you mind?' he asks, as he drops into the seat across from Lehnsherr.

'Make yourself at home,' Lehnsherr tells him; there is an edge of derision in his voice, but something more inscrutable in his eyes.

'I do hope this meeting goes rather more well than the last time we met here.' At the reminder, Charles checks the tightness of the lid to his coffee—a Red Eye, this time, that burns his tongue and jolts his mind into flurried activity.

Lehnsherr looks up from his book, marks his place and closes the cover, drawing it cautiously closer to him. 'I'm surprised you risk drinking coffee at all,' he says. 

A laugh bursts from Charles' lips, and he casts his glance quickly to the window. He brings his cup to his mouth to quell it, to draw attention from his reddening cheeks; with his free hand, he scratches behind his ear. 

'I'm not so irredeemable, I think. Anyway, it's fortuitous that I saw you here.' He sets his cup down, places his palms on the table, leans forward; he watches Lehnsherr, keeps a keen gaze on the subtle shifts of his expression. 'You won't believe what I found, the other night.'

Lehnsherr lifts an eyebrow, smiles in a contemptuous half-turn of the corner of his mouth. 'Won't I?' 

'A New York Times article.' Charles pauses for effect, gives a bright smile. 'About you.' 

'Is the New York Times really so excited that I'm teaching at Haworth?' Lehnsherr crosses his arms over his chest, leans back in his chair. 

'No, no, I don't mean about anything to do with Haworth. It was published in 2001—November—the ten-year anniversary of your last art show. Apparently, the Times is rather curious about what you've got up to, since then.'

A slow rise of expression dawns on Lehnsherr's face, spreads through his body, spreads into the air around him. His brow knits; his mouth tightens; his shoulders go rigid, and his fingers flex against the fabric of his jumper, curl into fists. He seems to close, to recede, to make himself impenetrable; and Charles realizes, with a cold crawl of dread in the center of his chest, that he has done something wrong.

'It was twenty years ago,' Lehnsherr says. He looks out towards the window, across the street. 'They can go without knowing.' 

'But I'm curious, too. Of course I know what you've got up to—that you're teaching art history, at least; but I couldn't imagine having given up my own passions at fourteen. So perhaps it's a selfish curiosity. Still, I wonder what it was that made you leave. The Times said it was one of art's great mysteries. It must have been nothing short of monumental.' 

'It wasn't.' Lehnsherr's voice has lost whatever warmth it may have held. When he speaks, Charles feels it as the edge of a blade. 'I haven't asked what happened to _you_ twenty years ago.'

Charles retracts his arms from the table, folds them into his lap; he worries at the buttons of his coat, watches the surface of the table. 

'You'd really care to leave it? To never tell anyone? To never make art, ever again?' 

Lehnsherr rises. His chair scrapes against the floor; he tucks his book under his arm, picks up his cup of coffee. He is matter-of-fact; he does not shout, does not censure Charles. He is, in his particular manner, resigned.

'Stop!' Charles springs to his feet—he reaches out, means to grasp Lehnsherr's shoulder and tug him back—but he draws his hand back, then, lets it fall to his side. A livid shame heats his cheeks, quickens his heart, dampens his palms. 'I didn't—I didn't mean to say anything awful. In fact, I didn't think I _had,_ which is why I'm positively bewildered that you're— Really, I don't— Are you angry with me?' 

'Leave it,' Lehnsherr warns. He sets his jaw. 'I've got to go.' 

'Would you—at the very least—tell me what I've done?' Charles raises his hands. 'I had thought we had established a rapport; I don't know; was I mistaken?' 

Lehnsherr watches him; and Charles has never before felt so painfully _seen_. 

The shop has fallen into silence. There are muttered murmurs from the students seated in the tables around them, and the whistle and clatter of the coffee machines at the front, and little else. If Charles looked—and he can't bear looking, so he doesn't—he expects that he would see all of the eyes in the room fixed on him. He feels the gazes—tiny, piercing bores across his skin, a sharp spatter of pinpricks. Lehnsherr's gaze is the sorest.

In a slip of black, Lehnsherr turns, shoves his way through the crowd of students, flings open the door and departs. 

The sound of conversation resumes, heats itself again to new clamor. Students tap at their phones; the line at the front progresses, grows longer and shorter in turns; and Charles stays for a long, weary moment in the center of the room. 

He picks up his coffee, tugs his scarf tight around his neck, and begins his slow trudge to Thornton Hall. When he raises the coffee to his lips, again, it is lukewarm and repulsive on his tongue. He empties the coffee into the gutter and crumples the cup in his hand and tosses it into a bin. The wind is cold, and the sky is grey, and the leaves are brown. They break under his feet as he walks.

-

In a week, at one of their usual meeting times, Charles returns to the chess table in the alcove.

He hovers, for a long aching while, at the entrance to the library. When he steadies his resolve, he strides through to the alcove—thinks of what he will say to Lehnsherr—envisions himself sitting in the chair across from him, saying, 'You must have missed me awfully'—shudders at the presumptuousness, and instead envisions himself saying, with wide eyes and bitten lips, 'I missed you awfully.' He forms the words in his mind: 'Let's be friends again, shall we?'

The table is empty. The alcove is silent. The armchairs stay their dull maroon in the shadow and dust-light of the window. The chessmen are set, battle-ready, in their starting positions. Charles gazes at the scene for a long time, and then he goes away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's all right, all hope is not lost. Anyway, I've included an image in this--if you can't read it for any reason, let me know and I will add the plain text in a comment. Edit: I've added the text of the image beneath it.


End file.
